JPL Interns: 'How I'm Spending My Summer Vacation'

JPL is hosting 700 students this summer for space-related projects including preparing to study the first sample returned from Mars in the future, searching for signs of life on distant worlds, and building new technology to take space exploration farther. Interns pictured from left to right: Amanda Allen, Zachary Luppen, Tre'Shunda James, Camille V. Yoke, Joshua Gaston, Christopher Esquer-Rosas, Kathy Vega, Rebecca Foust, Sawyer Elliott. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech › Larger view

In honor of
National Intern Day on Thursday, July 26, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, California, is celebrating the 700 students from around the country
who are spending their summer working on space-related projects at the
laboratory. A collection of stories about some of the interns and they ways
they are contributing to NASA missions and science is available online.

During their
10 weeks at JPL, interns are working side-by-side with scientists, engineers
and technologists in their exploration of the solar system and beyond. They're
involved in such projects as preparing for missions to Mars and Jupiter's icy
moon Europa, studying the habitability of planets outside our solar system, and
developing the spacecraft of the future.

Intern
Camille V. Yoke, a physics major from the University of South Carolina, is
helping develop a spacecraft thruster similar to one that could eventually send
astronauts to Mars. She says of her project, "Today, there was a brief period
in which I knew something that nobody else on the planet knew -- for 20
minutes before I went and told my boss. You feel as though you're contributing
when you know that you have discovered something new."

To find out
more about Yoke's project and some of the other ways interns are contributing
to NASA missions and science, visit: